We were left to fend for ourselves in this strange country that my mother had immigrated to, the United States, that same country in which I was born. When I was six years old, my father abandoned my mother, my sister, and me. There are so many thoughts and feelings I want to share, but they feel garbled, muddy in my mind, weighed down with the impossibility of all the feelings that I have for one woman, for everything she represents in my life. I want to say something to her although I don’t know what yet. I am going to Korea because I haven’t been in almost eight years, and I would like to see my grandmother one last time. My grandfather died several years ago, and all of my grandmother’s other children, including my mother, live in different countries, and one of them, my uncle, is dead. My aunt, my mother’s younger sister, takes care of her. I have been told that she now spends most of her day in bed, and that she has dementia. I am 34 years old and I am trying to learn Korean now in an attempt to speak to my grandmother, who is 88 and lives in Gunpo, a small city south of Seoul, where I’ll be visiting this year. Who could blame a child, and the woman whom that child becomes, for wanting those things?īut only now do I know that the farther I have gone, the more unable I am to move on, as if releasing myself from one burden has only compounded the others, the rock that once drowned me was there to keep me from going adrift. I could choose a nice middle-class life in which the expenses of simple house repairs, routine doctor and dental visits, or new shoes or clothes just because they looked pretty would not ruin my life. I pushed myself further away from her on my raft, because on that vessel, which I strung together out of the Americanness of my life, I could be free from her. Sometimes, a child who feels she has no agency-watching the world fall apart around her, as if every unexpected expense (a broken water heater, a leaking roof, a car that won’t start) is the equivalent of a natural disaster-finds that the only self-determination she has is inside of a book, and that the cheapest utensils she may have are pen and paper.īut, growing up, as I wrote and read more and as my English became stronger, the ties I had with my mother, who spoke only Korean, grew weaker. As many lonely children do, I escaped on the page.
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